Chemical risk assessment, communication and management in recycled water

Are you logged in? If you are from a WaterRA member organisation, you can access a wider range of content for this and other projects by registering and logging in, using the panel on the right.

Background and Relevance

The aim of the study is to adopt and validate methods or tools for assessing the potential for ecosystem and/or human health impacts from drinking water that contains a significant proportion of recycled water. The detailed project aims are:

• Review mechanism-based bioassays across a number of levels of biological organisation (molecular and/or cellular) to estimate the relative biological activity in the water matrices
• Evaluate in the laboratory, a selected set of biological assays according to an agreed set of criteria to be developed with stakeholders
• Conduct an evaluation of the water/samples by chemical analysis as validation for biological assays, and identification of cause including the list of priority chemicals as per the draft National Water Recycling Guidelines
• Provide guidelines (toolbox) of appropriate and robust methods for measuring biological activity for different water matrices to inform development of Hazard Assessment Critical Control Point (HACCP) risk management and strongly support monitoring programs
• Use the outcomes of the project in risk assessment and risk communication to stakeholders.